Iturbide Monarchy Period

The Iturbide Monarchy Period enters the narrative not as a dramatized historical episode but as the endpoint of a living family’s political fantasy. In a congresswoman’s recollection of her childhood friendship with Kelly, it represents an idealized past without upheaval, invoked to explain the family’s exclusivist idea of Mexican identity and social order.

Historical Ideal in a Family’s Story

The congresswoman describes her relatives as ranking Mexico’s political eras according to their own fortunes: life had been tolerable under Porfirio Díaz, better under Emperor Maximilian, and would have been best under Iturbide, in a monarchy without interruptions. The sequence turns historical change into a scale of aristocratic preference, with the imagined stability of monarchy at its summit.

This is a family’s retrospective judgment, not an impartial account of the period. Its emphasis falls on continuity and social privilege: the ideal past is valuable because it promises an order undisturbed by upheaval. The recollection therefore reveals as much about the family telling the story as about the political system it praises.

Class Boundaries and Mexican Identity

The family’s monarchist nostalgia accompanies an exceptionally restrictive definition of belonging. In the congresswoman’s account, her relatives imagined that only three hundred families—some fifteen hundred or two thousand people—were truly Mexican. They cast everyone else as outsiders or socially suspect, a view that shaped their distrust of Kelly’s father and their assumptions about Kelly’s mother.

That prejudice did not prevent the two girls from visiting one another, but it framed the friendship with a class barrier. Kelly’s family home was comfortable and stylish; the congresswoman’s sprawling house possessed, in her later description, the class and permanence her family prized. The monarchy ideal thus belongs to a broader social imagination that confuses inherited status with national legitimacy.

Narrative Function

The period is recalled during a conversation with Sergio Gonzalez about Kelly and the congresswoman’s childhood friendship. Its brief appearance connects private memory to political history without turning the recollection into a historical exposition: a claim about the country’s past becomes evidence of the family’s values and inherited social divisions.

The contrast between the family’s desire for a Mexico without upheavals and the novel’s accounts of revolution, repression, and exclusion gives the phrase its critical weight. The Iturbide Monarchy Period functions here as a remembered emblem of order, but the order being longed for is inseparable from the family’s belief that national belonging should remain in the hands of a tiny elite.